Gianni Pettena
∗1940, Italy
lives and works in Florence, Italy
The architectural intervention Hotel Ladinia, conceived in situ, is Pettena’s melancholic attempt at poetic action. Referring semantically back to the architect's projects, conducted in the early 70s and later on too (with the most recent iteration in Frac Lorraine, Metz, 2014), Pettena animates the building whose history was interrupted by the quasi-carnivalesque costume of the multiple stripes of white paper. In fact, the stripes that cover all windows and doors of the long-disused building vertically indicate the intention to revitalize it through lightness and movement, renewing its perception as the language of communication; something which architecture also ought to be, but which instead is often fossilized in imitations and fashionable manners, homogenizing anonymity, absence of vitality.Gianni Pettena’s performative installation POIESIS, conceived especially for the Biennale Gherdeina, echoes the anarchitect’s radical statements of 1968, expressed in a trilogy of CARABINIERI, performed in the courtyard of Novara’s city hall, MILITE IGNOTO (UNKNOWN SOLDIER) in Ferrara’s Palazzo dei Diamanti and GRAZIA & GIUSTIZIA, presented at the 6th Festival of Avant-Garde Music in Palermo. Pettena’s large-scale installations consisted of a wall of cardboard measuring about ten meters by two in the form of a word; the sheets of corrugated cardboard assembled into three-dimensional shapes with staples, eventually spelling out a statement of a political relevance and urgency. The trilogy held a contextual dialogue with the city, in which words, constructed deliberately out of cardboard, a perishable material, ended up self-destructing. For a radical architect Gianni Pettena, it was a reflection of the desire to transcribe thoughts in terms of slogans, typical of the student revolt in May 1968; the desire, expressed but to no effect, to spell out an ideological position, to signal the intention to take a stand, even as operators in the field of architecture. And so these three inscriptions took on gigantic dimensions, invading the architecture, conversing with the architecture, limiting its meaning. The preexisting architecture just served as a backdrop to the phrase that was in itself a stereotype.
On view in Circolo, there is a series of photographs, About Non-Conscious Architecture, that constitute a sort of catalogue of “works of architecture not made by architects”, discovered in the course of Pettena’s travels in the United States in the early 1970s. The work constitutes a search for a genuine language of architecture; it points out the existence of a “non-conscious” architecture that, by the sole fact of having remained unspoiled or having been constructed in those forms for evident and elementary needs, demands analysis and prompts reflection on the different attitude toward architecture in the European context, or at any rate in that of modern capitalist society. From the mining zone of the Great Salt Lake down to the landscapes of the desert, the wind-formed architecture of Monument Valley, the anarchitect conducts “a journey back to find the threads of a discourse that is no longer very recognizable [because] the harmony, the osmosis with a physical space depends on a multitude of mental habits, or on a disposition that has now been lost.”
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